Holy crap, that's what's happening?
It took me hours to figure out that the failed boot was caused by the `/var` symlink being removed. I was literally a minute away from reinstalling the OS when I saw a post from 2014 that had a passing reference to the `/var` symlink.
Then I went through and disabled every conceivable startup program, and even created a bash script to fix `/var` when it randomly disappeared. I didn't even consider that it could be Chrome causing it.
This all happened with SIP enabled, btw.